Imagining and Claiming the Land

As Europeans touched and began to penetrate land that, previously, had been entirely outside their experience, they began to name and map it, and in so doing to reconceptualize it in European terms. They replaced complex, finely worked-out Indigenous understandings of place and land with their own geographical generalizations – powerful simplifications that enabled them to explore, claim, and often colonize land they knew next to nothing about. In North America, the transfer of the un-European into a register Europeans could understand began with the first European comings and would long continue. Its sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century progress is considered here.

From TheReluctantLand (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2008), 20–29.

Before many europeans could operate along the northeastern fringe of North America, the European imagination had to make some sense of it, less, perhaps, to establish “what was there” than to arrange and order the land in terms that Europeans could understand. Otherwise, it was bewildering and profoundly disorienting. The process of ordering New World space, and thereby of making it knowable, continues to the present, but for some time after initial contact, explorers’ reports and maps were the principal means of bringing this space into some preliminary focus. Reports, based on fleeting observation and self-serving promotions, were usually tantalizing exaggerations. The maps that explorers and cartographers produced were egregious abstractions that represented endless complexities by a few lines. Yet these words and lines enabled Europeans to know and think in certain ways – ways embedded in systems of power that allowed them to begin to possess spaces they hardly knew.

Explorers’ reports and the maps they and European cartographers produced were means of translation and simplification. They rendered the myriad voices of new lands in an accessible European language. Once translated into this language, the land could be communicated, and then could be argued and strategized over from afar. Moreover, to the extent that this language enabled Europeans to orient themselves in a space about which they knew little, it allowed them to ignore Indigenous voices situated in intricate but, from a European perspective, essentially alien systems of knowledge. A few lines on a map served to eviscerate the land of its Indigenous knowledge, thus presenting it as empty, untrammelled space available for whatever the European imagination wished to do.

The process of translation and simplification began as soon as Europeans came into regular contact with the northeastern corner of North America. Its modern European discovery began, as far as we know, in July 1497, when the Genoese explorer-merchant John Cabot, sailing with the financial backing of merchants in Bristol and the permission of the English Tudor king Henry VII, reached coastal Newfoundland or Nova Scotia. He found a bleak coast, waters teeming with fish, and some prospect of a sea route to China, for which he received ten pounds

from Henry VII and support from his backers to outfit five ships for a voyage the next year. One of these ships soon returned, storm-damaged, but the other four never did. In 1499, a Portuguese, João Fernandes, reached at least Greenland (which he named Tiera de Lavrador, a name that would migrate west); a year later, another Portuguese, Gaspar Corte-Real, also authorized by King Manuel of Portugal, sailed as far as Greenland. He was back in 1501 and continued to Newfoundland but then was lost at sea, as was his brother Miguel who sailed to look for him. These precarious probes into the northwestern Atlantic had found and reported land, but what land? Cabot, along with his backers, thought he had reached a northeastern peninsula of China, an assumption represented on several early sixteenth-century maps. Fernandes and Gaspar Corte-Real thought they had found an island. The conceptual discovery of North America apparently had not been made, although a remarkable map by the Spaniard Juan de la Cosa and variously dated from 1500 to 1508 suggests that it might have been. La Cosa’s map shows a continuous coastline between the Spanish discoveries in the Gulf of Mexico and English discoveries, marked with flags, far to the north. It is the first representation of the east coast of North America. Some hold that La Cosa, who was in the Caribbean in 1499, could have got this information only from John Cabot, who, according to this interpretation, charted the coast and somehow communicated his findings to La Cosa before he and his ships disappeared.

Whatever the case, most European cartographers did not accept anything like the continental outline on the La Cosa map until the late 1520s. By this time, the Florentine Giovanni Verrazano, sailing for France, and the Portuguese Estévan Gomez, sailing for Spain, had charted the east coast of North America between Newfoundland and Florida. With a fairly continuous land mass established, the eastern edge of North America was coming into focus, and exploration turned to other questions: how to get around or through this obstruction on the route to China and whether profit might be derived from it. Verrazano had reported what he took to be open ocean beyond an offshore bar along the coast of the Carolinas. In the north, the Gulf of St. Lawrence was not yet known, nor was Newfoundland again understood as an island.

By the 1530s, bullion from the Spanish conquests of the Aztecs in Mexico, the Maya in Guatemala, and the Inca in Peru was flowing to Spain, and the prospect of finding and looting other empires became as enticing as a short route to China. In this climate of speculative imperialism, Francis I, king of France, commissioned Jacques Cartier, a Breton master mariner from Saint-Malo, to enter a reported strait beyond the Baye des Chasteaulx (the Strait of Belle Isle, between Newfoundland and Labrador). Cartier sailed in April 1534 and before his return in early September had explored most of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, taken possession of the land in the name of the French king, and captured two St. Lawrence Iroquoians, whom he took to the French court. These achievements earned him a second commission, and he was back the next year with three ships and 112 men. Directed by his two captives, Cartier sailed up the St. Lawrence River as far as his larger ships could navigate. From there, he explored west to Montreal Island, where he found a large wellpalisaded village (Hochelaga) comprising, he reported, some fifty houses, each about fifty paces long and twelve to fifteen wide. Returning to his ships, he spent a harrowing winter of unanticipated cold, scurvy (a quarter of his men died), and increasing Indigenous hostility before capturing ten villagers, including the local Chief (Donnacona) and getting away to France. But he had found, as he reported to the king, “the largest river that is known to have ever been seen,” flowing through wellinhabited “lands of yours” of great fertility and richness. He also brought reports of a kingdom of the Saguenay, one moon’s journey beyond Hochelaga, where he had been told “there are many towns and ... great store of gold and copper.” Such reports, embellished by Donnacona in France, drew an expedition in 1541 of some five hundred men. Headed by a French nobleman, Jean-François de la Roque, sieur de Roberval, this was intended less to find a route to China (which now seemed unlikely via the St. Lawrence) than to establish a colony and exploit the riches of the Kingdom of Saguenay. Almost everything went wrong. Cartier and Roberval were at odds, diamonds and gold sent back to France turned out to be quartz crystals and iron pyrites, the Kingdom of Saguenay was not found, and scurvy and Indigenous attacks decimated the colonists. Roberval and the last of the survivors left in July 1543. The French would not be back on the St. Lawrence for almost forty years.

Cartier’s explorations – and particularly the colonization venture with Roberval – had much in common with those of the Spaniards Coronado (with three hundred men) and De Soto (with six hundred), who at approximately the same time were drawn by tales of kingdoms and treasure into lands far north of the Gulf of Mexico. None of them found what they sought while traversing huge territories that Europeans had never seen before. In fact, Cartier had accomplished a great deal, although his politics had antagonized the St. Lawrence Iroquoians, the principal reason, probably, for the French withdrawal from the river. He had brought the Gulf of St. Lawrence and the St. Lawrence Valley into a European field of vision, had taken possession of them in the name of the king of France, and had transformed the cartography of northeastern North America.

Cartier’s own maps have not survived, but cartographers in Dieppe drew on his discoveries to produce several magnificent maps. Part of one of them, drafted by Pierre Desceliers in 1550, is reproduced in Figure 1. Newfoundland is shown detached from the mainland, the islands in the Gulf of St. Lawrence are approximately in place, and the St. Lawrence River is drawn to and somewhat beyond its confluence with the Ottawa.

Wherever Europeans had been, the map is strewn with names. Along the Atlantic coast, it includes but a few of the many names associated with the inshore fishery. Figure 2 shows more of them: the place names on sixteenth-century maps that can be located precisely on modern maps of Newfoundland’s Avalon Peninsula, a small fraction of the names that, undoubtedly, were then current in the largely oral world of the inshore fishery. Even within R de sam Joham (St. John’s Harbour), there must have been dozens of place names in several European languages. Further west on Desceliers’ map, the place names are either Gallicized renderings of Amerindian words or French names given by Cartier. All these names, superimposed on older namings in languages Europeans did not know and could not pronounce, served to make the land accessible to Europeans. It was acquiring an outline they could visualize and names they could recognize. Place names were a means of erasure: the name “Terre des Bretons,” for example, obscured the Mi’kmaq and other Indigenous peoples who lived there and other European fishers

FIGURE 1 Eastern North America, 1550.  The map is oriented with south at the top;

the peninsula at upper right is Florida. | Cartographer, Pierre Desceliers. For a large colour reproduction, see Derek Hayes, Historical Atlas of Canada: Canada’s History Illustrated with Original Maps (Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, 2002), 29.

who came there. A few of them suggest a tentative hybridity as some Indigenous words were rendered in European phonologies.

Desceliers’ 1550 map, like other small-scale maps of the day, was not for general distribution. He intended it primarily for Henry II, then the king of France, and not simply for the king’s pleasure. It showed the territory discovered and claimed for France by a French explorer commissioned by the king, and situated this territory in a continental geography, as then understood. Such maps were statements of possession and geopolitical tools. In effect, they were a means to transfer a few bits of information, real or fanciful, about a distant place to what the French sociologist Bruno Latour calls a centre of calculation where this spare information could be put to work. In this case, it entered the

FIGURE 2 Sixteenth-century European place names, Avalon Peninsula | After S. Barkham,

in R. Cole Harris, ed., Geoffrey J. Matthews, cart., Historical Atlas of Canada, vol. 1, From the Beginning to 1800 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987), plate 22

diplomatic channels of French geopolitics. So recontextualized, bits of information from maps or reports could be transformed into territorial claims that, from the perspective of the peoples inhabiting the territory, seemed to have dropped from the blue. When, in 1569, Gerard Mercator first engraved and printed a map of the world in the projection for which he became famous, he identified the lands on either side of the St. Lawrence River as “Nova Francia.”

The reports and maps generated by Cartier’s voyages and the French claims to the St. Lawrence had the effect of shifting northward the search for a passage to China. Magellan had found a southern passage; surely

God, in his wisdom, had also created a northern one. Most of the effort to find it was English. Beginning in the 1570s with three expeditions led by Martin Frobisher, continuing in the 1580s with John Davis, and ending in 1616 with William Baffin and Robert Bylot, the search between Greenland and Baffin Island reached the extraordinary latitude of 77° 45' N. It produced several ceremonial possession takings of land, fighting with the Inuit, black gold ore mined in Frobisher Bay (it turned out to be highly metamorphosed igneous rock), and harrowing reports of ice – on which Coleridge probably drew for “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” – but no passage. South of Baffin Island, Henry Hudson followed a strait into a huge chamber of the sea that became known as Hudson Bay, where he and his men overwintered in 1610–11. After the ice finally broke up the following June, most of his crew mutinied and abandoned him.

Other explorers followed: William Button in 1612–13; the Dane Jens Munk in 1619–20; Luke Foxe, backed by London merchants, in the early 1630s; and Thomas James, backed by a rival group in Bristol, also in the 1630s. With the technology of the day, the passage they sought did not exist to be found. But these voyages into Hudson Bay as well as those into Davis Strait and Baffin Bay transformed the cartography of far northeastern North America. Luke Foxe’s map, published in 1635 (Figure 3), shows what was accomplished. There were still a few holes in the cartographic coastline that might lead to passages, but after so much negative information, investors were no longer willing to assume the cost of probing them. Although they had no return to show for investments spread over fifty years, the English had acquired experience with Arctic navigation and knowledge of Hudson Bay, and both would be drawn on when an English fur trade began later in the century.

By this time, there had been French settlements on the St. Lawrence for more than two decades, and the fur trade was well in train. In 1632, near the end of his life, Samuel de Champlain, the explorer-tradercartographer who had established the French on the St. Lawrence, published his final cartographic synthesis of the regions in which he had spent most of his adult years. This remarkable map (Figure 4) shows the Atlantic coast with fair precision, identifies three of the Great Lakes –

FIGURE 3 Luke Foxe, Part of America, 1635 | Royal BC Museum and Archives, 1–61569

Lac St. Louis (Lake Ontario), Mer Douce (Lake Huron), and Grand Lac (Lake Superior or Lake Michigan) – and suggests Lake Erie. Champlain’s cartography had reached with some accuracy far into the continental interior, well beyond territory that any European had seen.

The map suggests just how far the venture on the St. Lawrence had drawn the French towards the continental interior and into contact with

FIGURE 4 Samuel de Champlain, New France, 1632 |

Library and Archives Canada, NMC, 51970

Indigenous peoples. To a considerable extent, Champlain had reproduced Indigenous geographical knowledge while, like other European cartographers, simplifying and decontextualizing it. He could not reproduce the intricate textures of Indigenous environmental knowledge, and the edges of that understanding that he did reproduce were detached from their cultural context. The pictorial representations of Indigenous settlements on Champlain’s map include elements of Indigenous architecture while resembling European peasant villages. Much of the map simply creates blank space. At the same time, it produced a type of information that, at the scale of northeastern North America, Indigenous knowledge could not match. It had shifted the land into a different category of information, one that Indigenous peoples did not need but that Europeans did, for it allowed them to visualize space and, however approximately, to get their bearings. Ironically, the Indigenous information that Champlain incorporated in his map became a means of enabling Europeans to reconceptualize Indigenous space in European terms. Like Desceliers’ before it, Champlain’s map enabled the French Crown to claim territory and in so doing to ignore Indigenous possession while asserting its own interests. A rudimentary knowledge of the land, made available in Europe, became a considerable source of European power – a cartographic equation of power and knowledge that would be repeated across the continent.